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Does google drive cost money free#
That information might seem mundane on the surface, but when extracted and organized, it’s incredibly valuable to marketers and advertisers.Īll the major e-mail providers, including Microsoft Outlook and Yahoo, benefit one way or another from offering a free service. When people send and receive messages using a free e-mail service, they are sharing details about their interests, who their connections are and what their finances look like. “Nothing in life is free, and as a result it is important for people to understand what value they bring to a free service of any kind,” said Behnam Dayanim, a partner at the law firm Paul Hastings LLP in Washington. What many consumers don’t consider is that companies such as Google can create a comprehensive profile of each user based on information from different products such as search, maps, e-mail and Google+, its social network. A conversation thread about meeting up at a spinning class, for example, might trigger an ad for a weight-loss product.ĭata gathered through e-mail scanning can also be used to create user profiles for future ad targeting. Gmail looks for keywords that identify topics of discussion based on things such as frequency and context, then matches the e-mail up with related ads. “The basic premise of Gmail is, we’ll give you a robust e-mail service and in exchange we want to display ads alongside our e-mail and we’re scanning your e-mail to decide what ads are most relevant,” said Eric Goldman, a professor at the Santa Clara University School of Law.
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